Eclipse is a widely used open-source IDE for Java. The main strengths are the powerful support for refactoring and Java coding in general. This article describes in a few steps how to setup Eclipse for Subversion access to RapidMiner (formerly YALE), how to build RapidMiner from source code, and how to run RapidMiner directly from Eclipse.

There are three phases in setting up Eclipse for RapidMiner: installing Subclipse - a Subversion client for Eclipse - using the Subversion client  in order to download RapidMiner and defining the correct settings for running RapidMiner directly from Eclipse.

Installing a Subversion client: Subclipse
 

For Eclipse 3.2 - 3.5 start Eclipse and click on "Help -> Install New Software...".

Type in the update site for subclipse ( http://subclipse.tigris.org/update_1.6.x ) into the "Work with" field.

After a few dialogs and a Eclipse restart you have successfully installed Subclipse. Please visit the Subclipse homepage for a more detailed instruction.

Setting up Subversion access
 

1.) You start by adding a new project from the file menu. Then you should select "Checkout projects from SVN":

2.) In the following dialog you should select "Create a new repository location" before you proceed with "Next":

3.) In the next dialog you should fill in the Subversion repository URL ( https://yale.svn.sourceforge.net/svnroot/yale ):

4.) After proceeding with "Next" you have to specify the project which should be checked out. Either you choose Vega for RapidMiner 5.x or Wasat for RapidMiner 4.6

5.) In the next dialog you can change the project name. The default value is "RapidMiner_Vega" (or "RapidMiner_Wasat"). You can start downloading RapidMiner by pressing "Finish":

6.) Now you have to wait until Eclipse has completely downloaded RapidMiner. That might take some minutes.

It should not be necessary to define further project settings in order to edit or compile RapidMiner. Eclipse should now build your workspace.

Important notes:

• If the compilation process leads to errors (several thousands), you might have to change the compiler compliance level to "5.0" since RapidMiner requires at least Java 5. The default for current Eclipse installations seems to be compliance level "1.4" which will lead to a huge amount of errors.
• If RapidMiner cannot be started (see below) after compilation and shows the error message
  
  

        ERROR: cannot find resources. Probably the ant target
        'copy-resources' must be performed!
    

  this indicates that RapidMi was not able to find the resource files (icons etc.). Just perform the Ant target copy-resources from the delivered Ant build.xml file. This is usually only necessary after the first check-out, after huge changes (e.g. new libraries are introduced), or after adapting the file operators.xml. In order to run this target within Eclipse, right click on the file build.xml in the main directory of RapidMiner and choose Run As -> Ant Build. If Eclipse/Ant complies that it cannot be executed since JAVA_HOME is not properly set, just create a new environment variable JAVA_HOME and point it to the installation directory of your JDK (which usually should have been done automatically during the installation of Java).

Running RapidMiner from Eclipse

7.) If everything has been compiled you might want to run RapidMiner directly from Eclipse. Select "Run Configurations" from the "Run" menu. There you can create a new Java application and specify the main class "com.rapidminer.gui.RapidMinerGUI":

8.) You might want to increase the amount of usable memory. For more information visit our Wiki site: